WASHINGTON — Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh attacked Sen. Ken Salazar of Colorado today on the oil shale issue, while Democrat Salazar said the debate is not about lowering gas prices but about helping oil companies.

The day after the Bureau of Land Management unveiled preliminary rules for selling oil shale leases in Colorado, Wyoming and Utah, Limbaugh quoted President Bush as saying that shale could provide fuel to meet energy needs for more than 100 years.

“But guess who’s standing in the way,” Limbaugh said. “Sen. Ken Salazar, Democrat, Colorado. “Even with $4 a gallon gasoline Salazar and his fellow Democrats are still preventing America from using our own resources to lower gas prices and create new jobs.”

Limbaugh accused Salazar of running as a moderate in 2004 and then acting as a liberal in office.

“The moral, in case you haven’t figured this out, is that new Democrats don’t exist except when they’re running for office,” Limbaugh said. “In office they’re the same old liberals they’ve always been and they don’t give a rat’s rear end about you or what’s right for the country, only about themselves.”

Salazar, interviewed later on 850 KOA, said that Limbaugh is “spreading falsehoods along with many of the people who want us to essentially give away the public lands of Colorado.”

Colorado controls 80 percent of the oil shale reserves in the entire country, Salazar said. The technology to develop that shale does not yet exist, he said, and there are unanswered questions about how much water it will take, where it will come from, and how many coal-fire plants will need to be built to process the shale.

Moreover, Salazar said, the BLM has said it will be 2015 at the earliest before oil can be extracted from the shale.

“This is not about the development of oil shale today that will help us with gas prices,” Salazar said “What this is about is trying to give millions of acres of land away to the oil companies so they can lock it up forever as part of their reserves.”

In an interview today with The Denver Post, Salazar pinned that strategy on the White House.

“It’s at the end of the day part of President Bush’s agenda and Vice-President Cheney’s agenda to essentially give away as much of the public oil and gas resources as possible during their term in office,” Salazar said.

Salazar put a moratorium into a spending bill last year, which bars the BLM from issuing final regulations. It expires Oct. 1.

A spokesman for Sen. Wayne Allard, a Loveland Republican who opposes the moratorium, said this morning that Salazar would fall 10 votes short if he tried to extend it through a Senate floor vote. Allard’s opposition kept the moratorium out of a spending bill for 2009 when that bill passed out of a committee earlier this month.

But Salazar said that the ban probably will not expire. Instead of passing individual spending bills, Congress is likely to pass what’s called a continuing resolution, which takes the language of most of this year’s current spending bills and rolls them into 2009. His language could be part of that continuing resolution.

Salazar, however, said in an interview with The Denver Post today that he does not have assurances that his language would be included in a continuing resolution.

“But certainly it is something we are going to fight for,” Salazar said.

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